Yesterday I wrote of the Queen of Wands Tarot card, the queen of the fire suit. In her book Tarot for Change, Jessica Dore likens her to Hestia, one of the original twelve Olympian gods.

In Goddesses in Older Women, Jean Shinoda Bolen writes of Hestia:

One of the most important Greek goddesses had no persona, no physically identifiable characteristics that can be seen in statues or paintings. She is Hestia, the goddess of the hearth and temple, one of the original twelve great Olympians, and the eldest….

As a goddess, Hestia was the sacred fire at the center of the round hearth, present in the flames and in the glowing coals, a source of light and warmth. As an archetype, Hestia is the still point, the center of the psyche, what many think of as the Self.

Bolen continues:

The goddess Hestia was one-in-herself, as many older women who have a sense of themselves as whole can be. These wisewomen are beyond the need or delusion that something or someone outside of themselves will complete them. They are at peace with themselves just as they are.

This describes me when I am at my best: at peace with myself just as I am, not seeking for something or someone outside myself for completion. In those times, I do feel myself to be whole.

And more than that, I feel a drive to manage things on my own. I am a do-it-yourselfer in many areas of my life: home maintenance, art, writing, money management — but in somewhat limited ways. Sometimes I must rely on other people and on commercial services for certain work I need done.

I am contemplating taking back the reins of my traditional IRA from the asset manager I’ve used for a couple years. The main thing he did for me was to keep my hands off the money. I love to actively trade, but for an IRA, a buy-and-hold approach is best (but perhaps adapted with some momentum-based timing rules to limit huge drawdowns and also tell you when to get back in after getting out).

Hestia the hearthkeeper

Maintaining a home, and a garden, and the money to support it can be a meditative activity. Shinoda Bolen writes:

Tending to household details is a centering activity, a means through which a woman puts her house and herself in order. As a “hearthkeeper,” she finds inner harmony through outer order. With Hestia, there is no rush, no eye on the clock, nor an internal critic. What she does pleases her and absorbs her in the same way that concentrating on the breath absorbs a meditator. As she sorts and folds laundry, irons or cleans up clutter, picks and arranges flowers, prepares dinner, or puts her closet in order, she is totally in the present moment.

I want to expand the idea of hearthkeeping to include money management, the fuel that keeps the fire burning. This is something I need to do a good job at for the rest of my life, until I can’t anymore, and by that point I hope I will have set up systems via which my kids can take over.

hestia the virgin goddess

Shinoda Bolen writes:

In Greek mythology, Hestia was one of three Olympian virgin goddesses (along with Artemis and Athena). They were the only divinities impervious to the arrows of Eros or the love spells of Aphrodite. Hestia did not take part in the conflicts, struggles for power, or contests that are the subject of so many myths. It was enough to be present in homes and temples. As a virgin goddess archetype, Hestia is “one-in-herself,” meaning taht she did not need anyone else to be complete, not a spouse, not a child, not a lover.

The virgin goddess archetype, as described by Esther Harding in Women’s Mysteries, is motivated by a need to follow her own inner values rather than a need to please, be liked, or gain approval. When a woman is one-in-herself, she does what has meaning for herself, and is not deterred by what other people think. This usually becomes easier to do the older one becomes. Sometimes, Hestia comes into the psyche only after loss and grief lead a woman to discover the richness of an inner spiritual life or the sweetness of peace and quiet.

This applies broadly to my life but also to my financial management. It has been difficult to go my own way with money management because it is so outside the mainstream. But I find my approach satisfying and effective, and I think I can do the same with my longer term funds.

I have seen much loss and grief in my life, for reasons I don’t want to get into here. But I think that has been an important part of the story I’m living, and provides a foundation from which to move forward, as one-in-herself.

Jessica Dore in Tarot for Change, writing on the Queen of Wands:

To build and maintain a slow and steady burn, a proper burn, requires knowledge, dedication and the right materials. If you can get a little fire going using some tiny bits of wood and paper—I’m talking shreds here—you’re laying a foundation for a bigger fire. Our creative lives are often what nourish and illuminate our lives through the nights and winters. So if you journal every day for ten years, you may be lighting the coals for the memoir you’ll write later, or for whatever it is that you think of as your “real” work.

The one argument I have with this is that journaling and other creative activities that are only for yourself can be your real world. You need not seek external validation or recognition for your creative life to matter.

Dore continues:

I can’t explain why but it just feels like there’s meaning in learning to make something from nothing, in walking that path from the Page of Wands to the Queen of Wands, where you start with a spark that you have to cup your hand around to keep lit and arrive eventually to a place where the fire in your life—the stuff that inspires, tells you that you’re alive, even reminds you what you’re uniquely here to do—burns steady.

Just this — telling you that you’re alive — that’s enough.

Most people who pay any attention probably sense that we’re in bubble times with the massive investment into infrastructure for AI training and inference. But are we circa 1998 or early 2000? The dotcom bubble kept inflating for far longer than many people expected.

I’m thinking we are closer to 2000 than 1998. The recent earnings season was wobbly, and we have recently seen the largest trading loss of all time, in the AI space, when Situational Awareness blew up from leverage and a concentration in AI hardware names.

What’s an investor to do? My solution recently has been to capture profits and move a portion of my portfolio to cash. Bonds aren’t a good option as yields keep rising, meaning the value of bonds goes down (bond yields and prices move inversely to one another). Tilting towards value stocks also seems a good idea, as these won’t fall as much as growth stocks in a correction or crash.

My advisor suggested I take a look at buffered ETFs such as these offerings from Allianz. They allegedly provide a buffer against a set percentage of market losses (5% to 20% in increments of 5 points) over a defined outcome period (three months, six months, or a year). And then returns are capped at some level such as 15%.

Funds like this use long call and put options to participate in upside and limit downside. Then they sell puts and calls (establishing short put and short call positions) to fund the long positions (which require an outlay of money).

The funds present certain limitations and tradeoffs:

• Protection is time-bound – The stated buffer applies at the end of the outcome period, not throughout.
• Capped gains can hurt in strong markets – If the market runs, you’re locked out beyond your cap.
• Portfolio fit matters – Buffer ETFs need to be integrated into a broader allocation. Treating them as a simple index substitute can lead to mismatched expectations.
• Early exit risk – Selling before the outcome period ends can lead to very different results than the marketing example suggests.

In practice, buffered ETFs can leave investors missing out on gains while still being exposed to potential large losses. They don’t protect against large tail losses, such as were seen in the dotcom crash. And they take away upside gains, such as we might see if the AI bubble keeps inflating for another year. Plus, their performance depends crucially on the timing of drawdowns.

In the abstract to their paper Rebuffed: An Empirical Review of Buffer Funds, researchers from AQR write:

Being an equity investor is hard. Volatility can be high, drawdowns can be long, and nobody can definitively (or a considerably lower bar than definitively) say when returns are going to be good or bad. Products catered to investor preferences of achieving equity-like returns with
less downside risk have been around for decades. “Defined outcome” strategies such as buffer funds are the most recent in a line of products designed to accommodate this desire and offer a wide range of customizations to fit investor objectives. Like their predecessors,
however, buffer funds don’t hold up to scrutiny, either empirically or theoretically. Once again Robert Heinlein, and his TANSTAAFL, is a better investment manager than the industry.

TANSTAAFL is “There Ain’t No Such Thing As a Free Lunch.”

The key findings of the AQR study of buffered funds are:

• Buffer funds, options-based strategies that aim to limit downside risk while capping upside, often underperform their reference assets in both returns and risk-adjustedterms, despite being marketed as investor-friendly solutions to equity volatility.
• The promised downside protection is inconsistent in practice—realized losses frequently exceed what investors might expect based on option payoff diagrams, especially outside narrowly defined periods.
• Simple alternatives like mixing equities with cash generally outperform buffer funds on average and even in drawdowns, raising questions about whether these products truly serve investor goals or just cater to behavioral preferences.

Conclusion: I’m not touching the buffered ETFs! I’ll use simpler alternatives, like “mixing equities with cash” which I’m already doing.

The New Yorker’s recent review of Rachel Cusk’s Life of M made me want to know more about Cusk. I had read her divorce memoir Aftermath shortly after it came out, in 2012, the year of my own divorce. It didn’t particularly engage me. I read at least one of the Outline Trilogy books, probably the first, Outline, in which she builds a character through reporting the conversations that character has with other people. This trilogy of books established Cusk as the “reigning queen of autofiction, the literary subgenre in which the lines that divide narrator from author are knowingly smudged.”

Interestingly, Cusk experienced a kind of death before Outline came out:

“Without wishing to sound melodramatic, it was creative death after Aftermath. That was the end. I was heading into total silence – an interesting place to find yourself when you are quite developed as an artist.”

For almost three years, she could not write, she could not read. Novels seemed especially pointless. More and more – like Karl Ove Knausgård, whom she cites – she felt fiction was “fake and embarrassing. Once you have suffered sufficiently, the idea of making up John and Jane and having them do things together seems utterly ridiculous. Yet my mode of autobiography had come to an end. I could not do it without being misunderstood and making people angry.” Using herself as the “template” was judged by some readers as a “wilful exposure of self, a washing of dirty laundry in public”.

Her memoir Aftermath hadn’t been received well, either by critics or the general public. The New York Times reviewer Emma Gilbey Keller writes that “her intellectualism… often comes across as pretension,” and “Most striking about the discrepancy between her fiction and nonfiction is that her made-up characters seem far more real than her real ones.”

Keller continues:

Yet as a whole this book doesn’t work. Cusk’s biggest problem is her main character. Her self-absorption is still acute. The way she analyzes her every mood does not make her likable. Nor does it make for an interesting narrative. Frankly, the book is often tedious.

At the time Aftermath came out, Cusk was a celebrated novelist. Her first novel, Saving Agnes, won the Whitbread First Novel Award and her seventh, Arlington Park, was shortlisted for the 2007 Orange Prize.

I might like to go back and read some of her early work. In The New Yorker review, Becca Rothfeld writes:

Cusk’s first three books, two of which were published before she was thirty, are outfitted with all the traditional amenities: scenes, characters, plots, and, for good measure, self-conscious allusions to Jane Austen and the Brontës. These early efforts are funny, cynical, and so overwritten that it is hard to believe they were produced by the same woman later hailed for her spare, sleek style. By Cusk’s fourth novel, however, she was staging an understated revolt against the form she had chosen and had evidently already started to disdain. “The Lucky Ones” (2003), “In the Fold” (2005), “Arlington Park” (2006), and “The Bradshaw Variations” (2009)—the products of her middle and best period—are more like interlinked character sketches than like plotted novels. Each presents a group portrait of a handful of disaffected British suburbanites—husbands who resent their deadening jobs, toddlers who whine and interrupt, and, above all, hassled wives subsumed by a crush of household obligations.

In order to leave the constraints of the standard novel, Cusk traveled through a place of despair and creative death, not to mention a publically considered divorce.

With Life of M, Cusk continues to invent and reinvent her ways of writing, writes Rothfeld:

Despite her reputation for rigor, “Life of M” is not a disciplined dismantling; it is discombobulated and haphazard, a machine breaking down at random. As Cusk has become more disdainful of fiction and more insistent on the documentary function of art, her work has become vaguer and less concrete, fading like old ink into blurred indeterminacy. 

I’m fascinated by stories of reinventions like these, especially ones where a person goes through periods of acknowledged brilliance (with the writing of the Outline trilogy, and earlier, with her first novels) and struggle (with the publication of her memoir and now, perhaps, with her latest experiments in fiction).

Media speculation and details from the book itself have suggested that Life of M is about actor Natalie Portman, a friend of Cusk’s. A reviewer on Goodreads writes of this situation:

While the novel might be based on Natalie Portman, it is not about Natalie Portman—and that is part of Cusk’s self-referential mocking. This novel is about a novelist projecting onto an actress, imagining the inner life that is kept from the public, and thereby eliding her even as it seeks to elucidate her. By conjuring the actress Natalie Portman, the novel also disappears her into a realm of fantasy and abstraction. The unstated truth of the novel is not that fame dehumanizes the actress but rather that it desensitizes everyone else to a real person, robbing them of the ability to see the actress clearly as an individual with real experiences. So the novelist invents an actress troubled by her own unrealness. It’s irony all the way down.

I wonder how much Cusk is taking her own experience of fame (as she is a famous and celebrated novelist) and projecting it onto her imaginary version of Portman.

I ask myself: do I want to read this novel?

And I think: no I don’t. Reading the very well done New Yorker review was enough for me, and I feel almost exhausted by it.

But it’s another piece of evidence or, perhaps, insight that I can use to develop my own understanding of how fiction can emulate life, or vice versa.

I started to create a Meetup group yesterday, moving out on my plan to launch a local philosophy discussion group. But overnight I started questioning whether I really want to take that on.

I realized it might be more of the same: not feeling content with the life I already have, thinking I need to have more social interaction (because my culture says so), feeling like I should do something, seeking external validation for my intellectual achievements and capacity.

“Yes, you can!” said my inner achievement subject. “Let’s get out of basecamp!” said my inner mountain climber. “Fulfill your purpose!” said my inner self help fanatic.

What if where I am doesn’t have to be preparation for something better and higher and more externally impressive?

The stuff of my life

Achievement minimalism might help out with some material minimalism I’ve been thinking about pursuing.

My house is filled with evidence of my past efforts at achievement: a guitar and guitar music from when I went through two years of group lessons at Swallow Hill, video lighting and microphones for when I thought I’d start a YouTube channel, a studio full of paintings and art supplies, photography equipment worth thousands of dollars both for photographing paintings to turn them into print and to possibly pursue a professional photography career.

I want to get rid of some of this stuff but it makes me feel a little bit like giving up on myself and my potential future(s).

Maybe it’s time to give up on myself.

Maybe that’s a key move in achievement minimalism.

I love to write (and think) so much

One thing I really appreciate about blogging here every day is that it is a countermove to the achievement society.

I don’t blog here to build an audience. Sometimes I see that I get a big influx of views and mostly I try to ignore it. I can’t really tell where it comes from based on the WordPress stats and I don’t want to get caught up in it.

Making it 1,000 days long means it’s not about a short-term goal. It’s more about a daily-ish practice, just continuing to show up day after day, with no thought of some outcome for it.

I wrote on July 1st of this year about surrendering to writing solitude. But part of me — the achievement subject in me — keeps whispering inside my brain, “you need to do something with this! Something that reaches other people! Something that is not so self-indulgent!”

Byung-Chul Han offers, as an antidote to the achievement (a.k.a. burnout) society, the vita contemplativa. And perhaps that’s enough for me. A life of contemplation.

Achievement maximalism vs achievement minimalism

Achievement maximalism – doing things for other people, to impress them, to get their attention, to seem important, to quiet the voice in my head that says “you should live this way not the way you are living.” Making more and more and more money.

Achievement minimalism – living the life that makes sense to me rather than to the crowd, seeking satisfaction in having engaged fully with a writing or an artmaking task, accepting my wish for solitude at this stage of my life, letting go of the versions of me that might have been but will not be. Accepting my life right now as it is as enough financially, materially, activity-wise, socially.

Which life do I want? The latter.

People are always training for something, says Peter Sloterdijk, in his book You Must Change Your Life. He uses the term anthropotechnics to describe the practices through which human beings form and transform themselves. This word derives from the word anthropos for human being and technē for art, craft, or technique.

What kind of training do people do? Artistic, religious, writing, consumption, professional, physical.

Whatever you do repetitively determines what you become, says Sloterdijk. You create yourself not through one-off choices (though of course they can have major impacts) but rather through what you do again and again, weekly, and daily, and even hourly.

Sloterdijk likens this ongoing training to askēsis, the Greek word meaning exercise or training, and from which the word ascetisim derives. You can be an ascetic in the Sloterdijkian sense by your repetitive practices, not necessarily by any kind of physical denial.

My daily blogging here is my training. What am I turning myself into? A writer, a practitioner of the vita contemplativa, and, increasingly, an everyday philosopher, a term that has been rising in my consciousness as a way to describe what I do, and who I am becoming.

Lately I’ve been training at something else: modern calligraphy on acrylic paintings. I took a course in it at a nearby rec center about a year and a half ago with my younger daughter. We used a brush pen to do the lettering, but I am teaching myself to do it with paint brushes and acrylic ink. I have in mind beginning a painting series I’m tentatively calling “Beyond Kitsch,” in which I take the stylistics of domestic word art signs but add back in the unacceptable and painful via words you don’t normally see in such objects. I’ve recently been reading Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being in which he deals with the problem of kitsch. Meanwhile, I’ve recently completed an assemblage for an art show in which I did something similar: took the smooth unreality and positivity of word art signs and added in the reality of human life.

So I’m becoming an artist, a (sort of) calligrapher, an elucidator of what’s not kitsch.

training to be a better dog foster

I welcomed foster dog Daphne this week and she is challenging me to get out of the basecamp of comfortable dog handling. She is reported to be almost three years old, but she acts more like a one-year-old puppy. She isn’t housetrained. She chews on household items (shoes, plastic combs, dishwasher parts). She can’t settle down during settle-down times.

She’s extremely sweet and affectionate — or is that fear? — and I really feel for her. I wonder what situation she came from to be almost three and not housetrained, not aware of any commands like “sit”, not able to comfortably settle into a household. Now, I note that she has been here for only a few days, so I’m not really seeing her true personality.

She goes to her official foster household on Tuesday. That will be a great relief. But meanwhile, I’m practicing being the foster mom she needs right now, taking her for lots of walks, tethering her to me while I do household chores so she gets to get around the house without using it as a potty, sweetly baby-talking her when I need to guide her behavior.

And practicing my options trading

I’ve been pleased with the latest iteration of my options wheel trading, in which I’m leaning now towards wheeling ETF tickers only (to avoid idiosyncratic single-stock risk) and only those sectors or factors which have strong charts (which means not much tech right now, as the air is coming out of the AI hardware trade).

I’m building my own web app to manage the trading. It’s read-only so only tells me what my situation is. It doesn’t allow me to trade because I don’t trust Codex’s coding skills and other actions enough to allow it to muck with actual orders.

Last week, I equipped it with various capabilities including computing profit and loss for different accounts and different time frames, noting whether each short put has a corresponding buy-to-close order to exit it at 55% profit, and showing my allocations across broad buckets so I know what I might want to add more of.

This week, I’ll continue making small changes as I see what I need for making my trade management as smooth and profitable as possible.

What else this week?

This article in The New Yorker makes me want to read more of Rachel Cusk’s work, but probably the earlier rather than the later. Will start that this week. In other reading, I have yet to finish The Unbearable Lightness of Being and might quit that.

I’m going swimming with my daughter today for the first time in many months. I had been prevented by my ski accident and surgeries.

And I’m going to push forward with plans to create a place of practice in my town for everyday philosophy.

Why does a person sometimes do things that are in conflict with the person they wish they were, or wish to become? Philosopher Agnes Callard calls this intrinsic conflict. It’s related to akrasia, a weakness of will or lack of self control.

Callard suggests that it’s aspiration that will provide a way to resolve the intrinsic conflict. In her philosophy, aspiration is a rational process of acquiring new values, preferences, and behaviors.

Some terminology:

• Enkrasia (alternatively enkrateia) – ancient Greek term meaning self-control, self-mastery, or power over one’s passions. Being able to do what you believe you ought to do.
• Akrasia – ancient Greek term for weakness of will or lack of self-control. A state of acting against your better judgement, where you know what you ought to do but you choose to do something else instead.
• Aspiration (in the Callardian sense) – the rational, purposive process of acquiring a new value.
• Proleptic reasoning – a mode of thought or argumentation that anticipates future developments, objections, or value transformations before they are fully realized. Provisional reasoning based on a potential future state of understanding.
• Intrinsic conflict – when a person feels torn between current values and the values they wish they had.

What kind of aspirations might someone have? They might want to become a competent guitar player, a daily meditator, an abstract artist, an everyday philosopher.

Perhaps the most obvious case of intrinsic conflict, though, is the case of health behaviors like overeating, overdrinking, lack of exercise, or overuse of social media (not exactly a health behavior, but perhaps mental health related).

How does aspiration towards health behavior change take place, in the real world?

There’s a model for that: the Stages of Change model, also known as the Transtheoretical Model (TTM), developed by James Prochaska and Carlo DiClemente starting in the late 1970s. They based it on analysis and experience with different theories of psychotherapy which gives it its official name. “Stages of Change” is apparently an incomplete name for it, as it includes processes of change and levels of change too.

The temporal stages of change in this model are:

• Precontemplation – no intention to change and may be unaware that their behavior is problematic
• Contemplation – beginning to recognize behavior is problematic, start to look at pros and cons of continuing as they are or changing
• Preparation – intending to take action in the immediate future and may begin taking small steps towards behavior change
• Action – making specific modifications in their behavior both modifying the problem behavior and acquiring new healthy behaviors
• Maintenance – have been able to sustain action for a substantial period of times such as six months and are now working to prevent relapse
• Termination – have zero temptation towards the problem behavior and feel sure they will not return to their old unhealthy habit(s)

There is also the possibility of Relapse, the return from Action or Maintenance to an earlier stage.

Some theorists have suggested that the stage of change can be analogized to stages of the innovation adoption process in Everett Rogers’ diffusion of innovations theory.

So aspiration towards behavior change might be thought of as an innovation in someone’s value and behavioral system.

Is all aspiration about behavior change?

If you want to become a minimalist… that requires behavior change.

If you want to become a concert pianist… that requires behavior change.

If you want to become a New York Times bestseller writer… that requires behavior change.

So perhaps aspiration is ultimately about behavior change? And it’s an innovation in someone’s behavior and the values underlying that behavior?

I have been continuing to think, since yesterday’s blog post Why Do Philosophy, and How, about how to do philosophy. How do you do it when you’re 58 years old, and not up for going back to school yet again, and you don’t hang out with anyone who has more than a passing interest in philosophy, or in living the vita contemplativa more broadly?

In the paper I quoted from extensively yesterday about Hadot and Sloterdijk on how philosophers do philosophy, Adam Robbert writes:

While Sloterdijk emphasizes Plato’s Academy, one could also investigate, as Hadot does briefly, the construction of other philosophical institutions, such as those of Aristotle (the Lyceum), Epicurus (the Garden), and Zeno (the Stoa), each places of practice that lasted for centuries. Along the lines of philosophical media ecologies and basecamps, one wonders if, alongside different beliefs and practices, these schools did not also differ in design and setting, each one affording an intricate mood or ambiance encouraging of that school’s discipline and world view. One also wonders whether or not the modern classroom provides anything like this requisite philosophical ambiance.

And later he continues:

Philosophy thus issues from within different ecosystems of activity, from within different practice landscapes and basecamps, to use Sloterdijk’s term. However, much like secession can occur anywhere secessionists dwell, so too are the basecamps of the practicing person none other than the person’s own ecology of practices, to borrow Isabelle Stenger’s term, and such places of practice can emerge anywhere. In Sloterdijk’s words, “They come about wherever those practicing parties who have resolved to secede step out of the river of habits.” In taking present action as the co-condition for future execution, then, a summit is always a new basecamp, a new basecamp merely an old summit.

And so I find myself in my basecamp here, writing alone, wanting a place of practice for myself and others who seek deep conversation, contemplation, and an exposure to contemporary philosophical ideas.

So I’ve decided to start my own philosophical club. I have no idea if I can attract people to the place of practice I aspire to create. But I am going to try it anyway.

My plan is to create something like the Highlands Ranch Philosophy Club. I’ve already reserved a conference room at the local library to meet every other Friday morning in September and October. I’m going to seek potential attendees via my personal network, through Meetup, and with flyers posted at local venues around Highlands Ranch.

My intention is to focus, at least initially on contemporary philosophers such as Agnes Callard, Byung-Chul Han, and, yes, Peter Sloterdijk.

I have much work to do before I’m ready to launch the various supporting pieces of this effort.

I am leaving basecamp, and setting out up the mountain.

Why “do” philosophy? To figure out how to live well?

Not according to Pierre Hadot, explained by Adam Robbert:

The French historian of philosophy Pierre Hadot (1922–2010) is best known for his reading of philosophy as a way of life. “Philosophical discourse,” writes Hadot, “originates in a choice of life and an existential option.” In linking life and philosophy, Hadot demonstrates that the choice of how to live does not lie at the end of philosophical investigation but at its beginning, that philosophy from the outset is the application of a certain ideal of life, exercised in community. Hadot continues, “I mean, then, that philosophical discourse must be understood from the perspective of the way of life of which it is both the expression and the means. Consequently, philosophy is above all a way of life, but one which is intimately linked to philosophical discourse.”

Instead, on this view, choosing to do philosophy is at the beginning a way to live well. The living well doesn’t come later, after study and contemplation.

To Hadot, and to German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk as well, philosophizing is a transformational practice that changes the doer as much as anyone who comes in contact with her or his emerging and evolving ideas.

To gain wisdom you can’t merely consume other people’s, Robbert writes, sharing Hadot’s philosophy of philosophy:

[Knowledge] and truth are not the kinds of things that can be directly received or transmitted. Humans are not data retrieval centers or simple information processing computers of any kind. As Hadot notes, neither knowledge nor truth “can be received ready-made, but must be engedered by the individual.” Philosophy on Hadot’s account is thus a kind of askēsis, a discipline of self-transformation, oriented around a set of practices unique to each school of philosophy.

Robbert quotes from Sloterdijk’s book The Art of Philosophy:

Just as the history of science usually presumes that the scientists who do their disciplines already exist, the history of art has assumed since time immemorial that artists are the natural protagonists of the business that produces works of art, and that these players have always existed as well. What would happen if we rotated the conceptual stage ninety degrees in both cases? What would happen if we observed artists in their efforts to become artists in the first place? We could then see every phenomenon on this field more or less from a side view and, alongside the familiar history of art as a history of completed works, we could obtain a history of the training that made it possible to do art and the ascetism that shaped artists.

Here Robbert uses the word ascetism rather than the word asceticism which appears in some translations of Sloterdijk’s work. Either way, the word relates to Sloterdijk’s idea that we are always enacting askēsis in our lives — training, exercise, practice.

As I get further along in my 1000-day project — almost halfway done! — I find myself spending more time with philosophy, not just studying it, but also developing my own.

I think of how I might expand this practice of mine to do it in community, to make an impact with it. Not to build an audience or to monetize it. But to make it into a community practice.

Robbert writes:

Far from being an activity of isolated individuals, the side view sees philosophy as a community practice. In this way, the practice of the self is deeply connected to a care for the city, for the community at large. At the same time, the philosopher is the one who stands partly at a distance from the community. Socrates, for example, both marks a break with and participates in the daily life of Athens, his city (polis). As Hadot writes, “Socrates is simultaneously in the world and outside it…. He is involved with people and with things because the only true philosophy lies in the everyday.”

While Socrates is involved in the city and its activities, he is also átopos—strange, extravagant, absurd, or placeless. Thus just as the philosopher lives the bios theoretikos she also lives the bios xenikos, the life of the stranger, a part of the world but a bit askew from it, neither in the world nor completely outside of it.

This reminds me of a blog post I wrote long ago, on my mom blog The Barely Attentive Mother (a reference to Buddhist bare attention, and secondarily referring to my difficulty bringing sustained attention to the difficult work of raising small children). I wrote of the idea of living orthogonal to cultural norms… of the culture but rotated relative to it. I said it was how I wanted to raise my children too. I was never a hippie granola mom but I was always dissatisfied with the prevailing norms and beliefs imposed upon me and my children.

I like the idea of living now atopically, developing philosophy that develops myself, but also develops in community.

I’m a naturally frugal person and though I occasionally allow myself a little indulgence, I mostly keep tight reins on my spending. I haven’t found that spending more reliably brings more happiness and satisfaction.

I’m not too big on travel, having traveled and moved around a lot as a younger adult. I’ve visited the places I want to visit. I’m a natural homebody, and my home is already in great shape so doesn’t need a fancy renovation or new furniture to serve as my sanctuary and my studio.

This past week I flirted with the idea of applying for full-time work after seeing a job opportunity that appealed to me. I thought about what it would be like to feel the flow of money coming in again rather than living off my savings and investments. I remembered that when I did work, I often spent more money just because I could, and because it helped distract from the tedium and upsets that full-time work brought to my life.

I’ve also thought at times that I should find ways to sell my art on a regular basis or turn my writing into an income stream, for example by selling subscriptions to a premium newsletter.

What would I get out of having more money?

• More protection against the unpredictable costs of aging
• More freedom to help my children with big expenditures
• Evidence of the value of my writing and artmaking
• More money to create art (but less time)

The first one is probably the one I think about most, and one that worries most retirees.

The last one is interesting and illuminating. When I went on an art retreat in Sausalito a couple years ago I met a woman in her seventies who was successful in selling her abstract acrylic paintings. She showed her work in a cooperative gallery she belonged to. She had been an interior decorator for many years, so she knew what kind of artworks would look good as decor. Her work uses sophisticated color combinations and exuberant markmaking.

She told me, “I make enough to be able to go to any art retreat I want to. I make enough to be able to pay for my supplies and more.”

She inspired me to think about the cycle of artmaking in a different way. Do I do it to make money, to earn kudos?

No. I do it because I can’t help myself. I do it to inspire other people. I do it to say something.

Fortunately I don’t need to make money from my art to be able to continue. My accumulated wealth funds it.

So maybe that’s what wealth is for, for me. To be able to create.

creations as gifts

Creating things can be a gift to the world even if no one pays for your work or hangs it on their walls.

Last Christmas, I made paintings of the extended family’s pets as actual gifts. But creative output doesn’t always move as obvious gifts. Sometimes the movement of gifts is more subtle.

My older daughter quit her software engineering job to focus her time and mind on creative writing. She cited my life as an example, since I have, throughout it, taken regular breaks from corporate tech employment to spend my energy on creative efforts like writing or painting. That is a gift I gave her: the gift of freedom to choose. The gift of knowing she could make such a choice.

In The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, Lewis Hyde writes:

Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. Finding one’s voice isn’t just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no matter how deeply he or she submerges that knowing. [emphasis mine]

I am not saying that my daughter was brought to the place where she is by “the work of a master.” I am no master. I am saying she was “converted to art by art itself.” She saw me writing as a young mother, writing out my struggles, writing out the reality of motherhood, sharing my joys. Much more recently, she saw me laboriously developing my skills as an abstract artist, hanging up my early efforts, small and crude though they were, and she saw my progress as the works became bigger, bolder, and more clearly mine. She saw art emerge, and an artist alongside.

She “inhaled the memory” of my work as a writer an artist, just as I did the same from my maternal grandmother, who was an accomplished oil painter and watercolorist.

Right now, my wealth allows me to make art, and my art allows me to connect with others and inspire them, even as they inspire me.